school

If I’d just purchased pretzel twists instead of pretzel sticks, we never would have had a problem. 

Here’s what happened instead. 

Everest whined for a snack, and I tossed a bag of pretzel sticks to him in the backseat. Not the healthiest snack, to be sure. Also maybe not the safest to have in the car. But it was a 40-minute drive from our house to the child care facility, and that can feel like 40 days when a child is profoundly unhappy. 

“Mommy, look!” he called to me from the backseat. 

I didn’t want to look because I was driving.

“Look,” he urged. “It’s our savior.”

At that point, I LOOKED.

Everest held two pretzel sticks in the air, arranged like a lopsided X, more like a cross. 

“Our savior,” he said again. 

You know when you get a migraine and your vision sparkles and blurs at the edges, and the world becomes sharp and throbbing? It was like that, but rage. A ragegraine. 

“Our savior?” I said. “Where did you learn that?”

“At school.” 

White hot rage with a little bit of blue fire at the center. 

I want my child to learn about Christianity eventually — I believe it’s a necessary foundation to understand a lot of literature, art, history, so on — but I want him to learn it in the context of other world religions. 

“Our savior,” Everest repeated. “I like our savior.”

Honestly, I had hoped to delay this part of parenting. I don’t feel equipped to teach my child about religion, because I continue to struggle with spirituality myself. My own belief system is constantly in flux — currently a bizarre Buddhist Hindu Quaker amalgam, informed by a childhood steeped in the Lutheran church, plus a dash of Catholicism. And I was furious that someone forced me into that situation when I wasn’t ready. 

“What do it mean?” Everest asked, and I didn’t have any answers.

Just a few months earlier, our beloved cat passed away. Everest struggled with the concept of death and continued to ask about Kung Pao Kitten daily. How could I possibly explain what the cross symbolizes without having another difficult conversation about what it means to suffer and die? 

From the school parking lot, I contacted a few parents who also had children in that class, and I told them about the “our savior” thing. They were shocked — but they insisted their children never said anything even remotely similar. 

Then I tried to casually discuss it with the teacher: “Everest said the funniest thing today … do you know where he could have picked that up?”

After the teacher denied having any religious discussions in the classroom, I had a meeting with the school director, who also assured me that the facility is religion-free. 

He must have learned it from another kid, I decided. 

“I bet it was that asshole Beckett*,” I texted to a friend.

On the way home that afternoon, Everest said it again. And again, I stewed. 

I brought my child to school the following day, but it was only to gather his things. We’d had enough. There were other issues, so it wasn’t entirely about “our savior” — when Everest moved from the toddler ladybug room to the older geckos, he never really warmed up to his new teacher. Several items of his clothing went missing. Twice he came home wearing some other kid’s underwear. And once that asshole Beckett called me a “sick pervert” for giving Everest a kiss goodbye. 

So I pulled Everest from the school. 

We found a new school, one that’s only a 7-minute drive away, not 40. He’s happy there. The place doesn’t have an enormous outdoor play area or a garden like his former school, but it makes up for that with a terrific staff, a great program, and some really wonderful families. I’m grateful we were able to find a spot there. 

It’s been about 9 or 10 months since Everest switched facilities — long enough that the current place isn’t his new school anymore, it’s just school. He’s bigger now and more developed. He’s learned so much. His vocabulary is expansive, and he can enunciate far more clearly.

Recently, I gave Everest pretzel sticks as a snack. 

“Mommy, look!” he said. Again, he had the two sticks positioned like a cross. 

Not again, I thought.

“It’s an X,” he said. “Like my friend at my old school. Xavier.”

That’s when the reality of what I’d done hit me with a gut punch. I pulled my child from his school for saying the name of his friend. X-avier.

Not our savior.

*Name has been changed to protect the real a-hole toddler